While Embark Studios has certainly celebrated the success it has seen with PvPvE extraction shooter ARC Raiders since its launch last year, the studio has now revealed that the development team was also feeling some burnout. In an interview with Game Developer, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal spoke about the challenges of developing a live-service game, which ultimately led to the team leaving behind its planned monthly update cycle for ARC Raiders.
“Transitioning to live service is going to be fucking hard. Everyone said that to me. I’ve even said that to other people. I was mentally prepared for it to be hard—but I wasn’t completely prepared for how hard it was.
“When you build a game up until launch, you build, and you test, and you build, and you test, and you fix things and measure results. So, the way that we’ve been building video games was based on that idea—but now the demands of the players are really high; we feel like we really can’t go much faster.”
This, Grøndal noted, might have even led to some of the updates not quite hitting a consistent level of quality, since developers were constantly feeling burnout as well due to the never-ending development cycle.
“The team is super tired. We’re putting out content as fast as we can, but it’s not enough, and perhaps it wasn’t necessarily interesting enough as well. I’m proud of what we achieved during the first four months of this year, but at the same time, I think we have to be honest when looking at some of the impacts of that.”
On the subject of moving away from monthly updates for ARC Raiders, Grøndal spoke about how the development team simply ran out of time and resources, making the whole idea quite unsustainable in the long run. Along with having to deal with the “cost of just maintaining the game” by working on bug fixes and dealing with exploits, the team was also “constantly overshooting our capacity, and so it was hard to plan when there’s so much to do. There’s a lot of maintenance and cleanup [that takes up so much of your time].”
Ultimately, the team decided to rethink its workflows. “We asked ‘why are we doing this?’ Everything pointed towards the fact that we were doing it better before shipping, so we need to play to our strengths […] and what we produce will be better, more interesting, and higher-quality across the board. It also gives us time to work things out instead of just shipping, shipping, shipping. We can actually iterate.”
Speaking about potential burnout, Grøndal spoke about his time working at Electronic Arts, where he felt fatigued after shipping a Battlefield game. This led to him “pushing so hard that I had to take a break for five months and go on sick leave because I was completely broken.” To ensure that the ARC Raiders team doesn’t feel these things, he said that Embark Studios takes the subject quite seriously.
“It’s very important for us to create a framework that allows us to be creative while having a good work-life balance. If we think long-term about this product—not just in small increments but big-picture stuff—we need all of these great people. Those are the people who built ARC Raiders in the first place.”
